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Digital Prize 2022
Winner
The Sound Voice Project: Exhibition V © Sound Voice 2021 i
Winner of the FEDORA Digital Prize
€50,000 with the support of Kearney
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The Sound Voice Project: Exhibition V: An immersive digital-opera installation created with partners in healthcare, technology, science and biomedical research, and people with lived experience of voice loss. Dynamic integration of voices from across the globe in an ever-changing and evolving work of art.
World Premiere: November 2024 - London, United Kingdom
Presentation
The Sound Voice Project is a unique immersive digital-opera performance installation for flexible, interactive spaces exploring voice and identity: co-created with interdisciplinary partners in healthcare, technology, science and biomedical research, and people with lived experience of voice loss.
The surround-sound digital-opera triptych, The Sound Voice Project, celebrates and explores the intrinsic value of the human voice. The project has tours to arts venues, non-traditional performance spaces and continues to evolve in the form of a new work 100 VOICES created especially for hospital settings. The project is a unique collaboration between experts in voice synthesis, interactive immersive sound design, video design, AR and motion capture, and biomedical research; soft robotics and implantable larynxes.
100 VOICES is the current ambitious addition in 2023/4 to The Sound Voice Project.
This new immersive sound documentary experience is designed to enable communities to explore the intersection of voice, identity of place. A mixture of operatic arias, audio documentary recorded both remotely and on location and digital voice transformations it explores how people use their voices, depending on how they identify, their role, status and relationship to others in an environment.
100 VOICES NHS is the first iteration of this work, created after five months of research, partnership and conversation in twelve hospitals across 4 NHS Foundation Trusts in the U.K. A hundred people reflect on their daily lives and work, their challenges, joys, inspirations and losses. The result is a unique and multi-layered snapshot of the NHS in music and words, expressed directly by people rarely heard; those working in service, patients, visiting local communities and the invisible, extended workforce of the NHS.
Four newly commissioned operatic arias "The Four Portraits", are interwoven within on-location recordings and further embedded within an original musical score to form an immersive audio documentary containing both fictional and lived-experience performers. Professional opera singers perform fictional character roles: the Midwife, Porter, Manager and Patient.
100 VOICES tours in 2023/4 to arts venues, public spaces and hospitals in four cities of the U.K experienced by audiences within a wooden structure especially designed to help audiences enter a state of deep listening; a birch wood sound-house cylinder, immersing audiences in 360-degree sound and an intimate acoustic. 100 anonymous performers are heard as individuals and also in digital transformations as a crowd, as a flock of voices, as a sonic tidal wave.
It was created through a series of creative collaboration workshops with interdisciplinary healthcare and technology professionals and facilitated physical spaces designed to support dialogue about voice and identity.
100 VOICES expands the existing Sound Voice Project to enable audiences to explore universal themes relating to voice and identity. How do communities perceive and understand their own and each other’s voices. What does it mean to use voice, to make oneself heard? How do we value voice, listen and define diversity of voice in society? What does diversity of voice enable or change on individual, organisational and cultural levels?
Cross-industry partners for The Sound Voice Project include twelve hospitals, a cutting edge biomedical research group ROBOVOX at UCL creating implantable larynxes, Parkinson’s clinicians, speech and language experts, digital technology companies specialising in vocal synthesis (Cereproc, Respeecher), medical device companies (Pentax Medical, ATOS) and UCL’s department of Healthcare and Engineering.
The FEDORA Digital Prize has importantly enabled transformation of the original The Sound Voice Project into a gallery version of the work which can tour to any space with headphone and LED screens, reaching audiences in festivals, non-traditional spaces and communities internationally.
Visit www.soundvoice.org to learn more.
Video Presentation
Artistic Team
The project team brings together world-class experts from across the arts, healthcare, science, technology, biomedical research, neuroscience and commercial technology sectors. The projects continues an exciting collaboration between composer Hannah Conway, video designer Luke Halls, sound designer David Sheppard, and librettist Hazel Gould. Further information about the core creative team is given below. This phase of the project will be an opportunity to collaborate with new artists, and will continue our collaboration with world-class opera singers including Lucy Crowe, Roderick Williams and Iestyn Thomas. Creative Producer Katherine Wilde brings a wealth of expertise as a producer, strategic thinker and artistic programmer. She has over 15 years of experience as a specialist producer making new multi-disciplinary work in collaboration with communities and young people, including work for English National Opera and MIF. Sound Voice Medical Director Thomas Moors is a Belgian medical doctor with a special interest in voice and the integration of art into healthcare. He develops Sound Voice’s professional networks internationally. In 2015 he founded Shout at Cancer, a charity for people who have had a laryngectomy. He received the Points of Light Award from the British Prime Minister in 2017 for his charitable work and achievements. We are working with Professor Nick Tyler at PEARL (Person Environmental Activity Laboratory), UCL, to explore the development of environments for cultural experiences, supporting the work we are creating to be experienced in hospital wards. Further cross-industry partners include five hospitals, a cutting edge biomedical research group at UCL creating implantable larynxes, Parkinson’s clinicians, speech and language experts, digital technology companies specialising in vocal synthesis (Cereproc, Respeecher), medical device companies (Pentax Medical, ATOS) and UCL’s department of Healthcare and Engineering.
